


Rotten

by eldritchbitch



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Decay, Gore, Horror, Maggots, Mental Disintegration, Mental Instability, Mild Gore, Parasites, Psychological Horror, Short One Shot, Unreliable Narrator, mold, rot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23699965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritchbitch/pseuds/eldritchbitch
Summary: A short horror story I wrote for a school writing assignment, with a central theme of decay, of varying kinds.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	Rotten

It is Monday, I think, and the fruit on my kitchen table is going bad.

It doesn’t bother me, really, though of course I bought the fruit with the intent to eat it. I always do. But I always seem to lose track of time, and before I know it, the bananas have patches of brown and black creeping across their pristine yellow shell, and the apples are soft to the touch, skin wrinkling with age.

In a way, I find it satisfying to watch the way food changes. I know it’s a waste, but it’s nice to have control over something in my life, and while I could certainly choose to prevent my food’s decay by eating it, inaction is always easier than action. By doing nothing, I cause something. It is a delightful paradox, and it tastes far sweeter than the fruit ever could.

Today I try to explain this to Amy, my wife, but she is sleeping in our bedroom, and I decide not to wake her. She sleeps a lot these days, but I don’t mind. Women claim they need their “beauty sleep,” and with Amy I know it must be true, because she grows more and more beautiful with each passing day she spends in bed. Besides, she’s sick, and she needs the rest.

It is Wednesday, I think, and I begin to notice other things in our house going bad, falling apart. Paint flakes off the walls like dry skin, rust coats all of the faucets and drains, and all the doors creak more than I remember, and are splintering at the edges. The kitchen is the center of it all, though. The fruit is still recognizable as what it was originally meant to be, albeit certainly inedible at this point, but there is a thin layer of slime on the counter that has seeped through the wicker basket the fruit sits in, and on the ceiling above it, there is a small circle of black mold.

I assume it is black mold, anyway. I am not a mold expert. I tape a note to the fridge reminding me to call someone in to check it out, and forget about it.

It is Sunday, I think, and an uneventful one. I am not a religious man; I only trust my mind, only believe things I can prove the existence of with my senses, not an invisible deity puppeteering our lives. But I like the sound of church hymns, and decide to play one for Amy on our piano. 

The music comes out… wrong. The piano is horribly out of tune, making the melody discordant and unrecognizable, and the keys are cracked and broken, making my fingers slip off of them and miss notes, or hit the wrong ones. It is disappointing, and I choose to spend the day watching television instead, ignoring the cloud of dust that arises when I sit on the sofa, and the static distorting the edges of the news channel I am watching.

I especially ignore the way that that static clings to the edges of my vision when I turn off the TV and go to bed for the night.

It is Tuesday, I think, and I want to surprise Amy with spaghetti for dinner. Spaghetti is her favorite. I go to fill a pot with water to boil, and the water that comes out of the faucet is brown and acrid. I boil it anyway; everyone knows that boiling water purifies it. I take out and open a half-used jar of spaghetti sauce from the fridge, and briefly think a mouse has somehow gotten into it and died, before realizing that the fur I am seeing is simply a thick layer of mold coating the long-expired sauce. It is oddly beautiful, like velvet, and I cannot resist leaning in to smell it, just once, just to see. The spores that I inhale send me into a coughing fit, and I drop the jar, shattering it on the floor and destroying that perfect velvet inside, and I curse at the mess, as if it can hear me, as if it is to blame.

My nose and throat burn, and the smell lingers in my nostrils when I breathe in. The sensation feels good. It feels like I am preserving the essence of that beautiful mold, within my own body. I don’t have any more jars of sauce, so I turn the stove off and pick up the bits of broken glass from the linoleum, resolving to make spaghetti another night. I can smell the sour aroma of the fruit on the counter as I clean, and can see the circle of black mold above me where I kneel, looming over my head like the pupil of an eye staring down at me.

It is much bigger now.

It is Saturday, I think, and it is difficult to be in the kitchen for long. The slime has covered the counter and hardened into a thick grime, and everything in the room seems filthy and neglected, the walls and floors sticky and crumbling. The fruit can no longer be called such, only a shriveled, blackened remnant of what it once was, and it has attracted flies. I do not know how they got into the house; all of our windows are closed, and I haven’t been able to open them for some time now, nor have I opened any doors. The fridge doesn’t seem to be working properly, as everything inside is expiring much too quickly, and what comes out of the faucet now is so thick, I lose patience when trying to fill a glass with its slow brown ooze.

The circle of black mold is bigger than ever, and it drips sometimes now. It is not a perfect circle, with thin spidery tendrils of rot stretching across the ceiling at its edges, spreading further with each passing day, or perhaps even each hour. I try not to look at it, because when I do, I find it hard to look away, and sometimes do not even want to.

I spend the day in the bedroom instead, combing Amy’s hair while she sleeps and breathing in the smell of mildew, of dust, and of her body, which hasn’t seen a shower in awhile. I don’t mind. She is far too lovely for me to be put off by a little odor.

She is so beautiful when she sleeps.

I can hear her whispering to me when I lie next to her that night, ever so faintly, but I can’t make out the words, so I just tell her that I love her, and to go back to sleep, and drift off myself soon after. 

My dreams are full of black mold.

It is Thursday, I think, and I cannot stop itching. My skin feels sickly and crawling, though I cannot find any bugbites or signs of a rash. I don’t wash off, though, because the showerhead falls off when I try to turn it on, and roaches pour out of the rusted pipe in hordes instead of water. I don’t bother to try to kill them. I am fairly certain the company I called about the mold also does exterminations, and professionals are better equipped to handle such matters. The ceiling light in the bathroom is dim and flickering, but it is bright enough for me to see the bathroom mirror over the sink, and I promptly destroy it, swinging the handle of the toilet plunger at the glass over and over again until it shatters completely.

I did not like the things it said to me.

I do not like the person it showed me.

It is Friday, I think, and there is a knock at the front door. I answer it and see a young man in the uniform of a cleaning professional, who greets me politely with a smile. I do not remember having called him, but I smile back, and invite him in, stepping to the side of the doorway to make way. The mold is in the kitchen, I tell him, and wave an arm to gesture him into the house. He suddenly goes very pale, and very quiet, and tells me he can’t help me today after all, and that he will have to come back another time, with different materials, or more backup; he isn’t very specific on the matter. He leaves too quickly for me to question him. 

I go back inside and quickly forget all about the encounter. I have better things to do anyway than to worry about skittish cleaning workers. I instead spend the day admiring the circle of mold that now spans nearly the entirety of my kitchen ceiling, losing myself in the dark, textured void of it, the wet cracks and wrinkles of the warped, ruined paint.

I do not blink when some of the moisture from it drips into my open right eye. I simply smile.

I see now how beautiful it is.

It is Monday again, I think, and I am screaming myself hoarse as my home crumbles and disintegrates around me. The air is thick with flies, buzzing around every hole in my face, undeterred by my swatting, and anywhere I step it seems there are roaches underfoot. The walls flake apart like wet cardboard as I walk down the hall towards the kitchen, and every surface I touch is soft and unstable, slick with filth. I am almost wary of looking at the beautiful blackened ceiling, but I do, and I weep in fear and delight as I see it finally split open with a wet crack, caving in a mountain of stinking remnants of wood and drywall and paint, cascading over the counter and onto the floor.

I can barely see anything besides static and flies as I flee down the rapidly deteriorating hallway to our bedroom, to Amy, desperate for her to see what is happening, to show her our home, to find out whether she finds it as beautiful and terrible as I do. I am still screaming as I grab her by the shoulders to rouse her from her sleep.

Her skin is so incredibly soft, so malleable, and I stop screaming when my fingers sink too far into her shoulders, and it sloughs off of her bones like moss off a wet log. I hear her whispering again, louder than before, and see the source of it in the black and red remains in my hands, in her shoulders, see the thousands of tiny white slivers wriggling and burrowing into her flesh, all chewing in a unanimous murmur as they devour my wife.

My tears etch thin lines through the dirt on my cheeks, and I am smiling so hard my jaw aches.

She is so beautiful when she sleeps, and I have never been happier.

**Author's Note:**

> Probably unnecessary to add this, and it will likely sound defensive, but I do just wanna mention that the creepiness and mild sexism of the narrator (like the comment about women and their ~beauty sleep~) was an intentional choice to make the story and narrator more unnerving and uncomfortable, and does not reflect my views on women. (Hell, I'm a trans dude, I WAS one once.) Women and feminine-aligned folks are awesome, and this dude's yucky. :)  
> Anyway, dumb comment aside, hope y'all enjoyed this story! Constructive criticism is very much welcome, and please leave a comment if you legitimately found this even a little scary! This is my first time writing horror, and I'd love to hear how I did and whether I successfully spooked anyone. :D Thanks for reading!


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